Post Christmas 2008, and AntiVirus Killin'

Well, here we are, less than 24 hours from 2009. Yeah, I haven't posted for a bit, but I've been busy. Between Christmas preparations, present purchasing, being tech support to an unusual amount of people this holiday season (for which I've been grateful $$), juggling 2 kids, etc etc, it's just been tough getting on here and posting about boring stuff.

Now that's outta the way, Christmas was great. You'll notice that my Wish-List has been whittled down a bit thanks to my lovely Wife. I think I have enough reading material to last for a while... when I can make time away from the Xbox. It was really fun seeing Alex Jr. finally grasp the concept of presents and the contents therein. It was really nice that he didn't know fully what was going on and thus we slept in until around 8:30am. w00t!

We basically opened our presents, ate a late breakfast and then sat around messing with out stuff. It was a little bitter-sweet Christmas day as lil Ben was sick all day. Not sick-sick, no temp but he had a good case of diarrhea. Never was I so grateful for that colostomy bag as I was for those few days. You gotta look for the silver lining... and I did.

On a tad serious note: coming from your friendly Internet tech guy, there has been a lot of Virus infections I've seen over the past month, all from the same strand. It goes by many names but they all say "AntiVirus". That's right, a virus that masquerades as an AntiVirus Program. It's called AntiVirus, then 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 360,.. etc. Yeah, it's been around a while, all the time perfecting it's entry into your computers. One way to combat this problem is to install SpyBot Search and Destroy and keep it updated and immunized! The immunization is the most important part. It prevents bad pop-ups, you know, the ones that look like a normal window (complete with the X in the top right corner to close out the window) and it says "YOU ARE INFECTED!!! THE WORLD WILL END UNLESS YOU SCAN RIGHT NOW!!!" followed by "YES, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS GOOD IN THIS WORLD, SCAN MY COMPUTER RIGHT NOW!!!!" or " NO, I HATE MY COMPUTER AND I DON"T WANNA SCAN"... when really this pop up wants to say "HEY LOSER, THIS WHOLE WINDOW, YOU KNOW, IT LOOKS LEGIT, BUT IT'S REALLY ONE BIG LINK TO DOWNLOAD OUR CRAPWARE ONTO YOUR CLEAN COMPUTER, SO LONG SUCKER!".

There are two easy ways to kill these windows without clicking on them.
1) ALT-F4
2) right click the task bar or CTRL-ALT-DEL, select "Task Manager", click on the "Processes" tab, click on iexplorer.exe and then click "End Process", and repeat until there are no more iexplorer.exe left (there will most likely be more than one).

Take care not to kill explorer.exe. That's a different program. Then update Spybot and Immunize.

If you do get infected, download and install MalwareBytes Anti-malware (link on the left). There's a free version that you can manually update and scan with and it's pretty good at killing this infection. Also, download, install/update your Antivirus program (Link to AVG Free on the left as well).

Then curse those monkeys who develop the crapware.

Happy Holidays

PS My spelling has been (un)usually horrible as of late... I choose to blame the touchpad on my notebook. BAD TOUCHPAD, YOU SUCK!